Liz Truss And Energy Bills

While the period of official mourning for the passing of Elizabeth The Second last week continues, and the dubious convocation of self-promotion merchants, headed by former Screws and Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan, and the singularly repellent Dan Wootton, as well as many others who claim inside knowledge of The Firm, continues to pontificate while in reality making it about Themselves Personally Now, life outside the bubble goes on.

And what our free and fearless press may not have figured out yet, with the calendar flicking over into mid-September, is that temperatures have begun their long Autumn decline. Nights are forecast to get significantly cooler; daylight hours shorter. All of which adds up to an increasing demand for gas and electricity. Which, whisper it quietly, is increasing significantly in price.

So Ms Truss told the Commons last Thursday “This Government is moving immediately to introduce a new Energy Price Guarantee that will give people certainty on energy bills [and] means that from 1st October a typical household will pay no more than £2,500 per year for each of the next two years … This will save a typical household £1,000 a year”.

However, “I can tell the House today that we will not be giving in to calls for this to be funded through a windfall tax”. So what kind of measures was she considering? “We will end the moratorium on extracting our huge reserves of shale, which could get gas flowing in as soon as six months, where there is local support”. Fracking. In six months. That’s cloud cuckoo land.

It rapidly got worse: as media outlets became less distracted by the run-up to the late Queen’s funeral next Monday, so some of them began to examine the Truss proposals. And even the BBC had to conclude that the measures announced would disproportionately benefit the better-off.

Their report has told “Rich households will receive twice as much support aimed at reducing the cost of living than poorer households next year, a think tank has claimed … The Resolution Foundation said if the government cuts National Insurance and limits energy bill rises, richer homes will get £4,700 in 2023, compared to £2,200 for the poorest”. There was more.

“A typical household energy bill will be limited to £2,500 annually until 2024. The think tank said ‘details and costings’ were missing from the plan. The huge support scheme could cost up to £150bn, but Prime Minister Liz Truss has refused to put a figure on it … The Department for Business could not offer a comment when contacted by the BBC”. National mourning, y’know.

And yet more. “Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) recently described the support package as ‘very poorly targeted … Finding a way of targeting [support] to the many, many millions who really need it, without giving it to the many, many millions who don't, appears to be something that has stumped the Treasury and the government’”. Oh dear!

The Guardian, meanwhile, was telling what the BBC had not: the Resolution Foundation “warned that Truss’s plan to avoid a fresh windfall tax on energy producers would mean heaping the cost on taxpayers, with as little as £1 in every £12 spent on energy support for households recouped directly from higher taxes on energy firm”. No windfall tax means we’re paying.

Ms Truss’ choice of advisors, and thereby policies, may, once Brenda is interred at St George’s Chapel and Royal coverage gives way to the more mundane business of that cost of living crisis, have handed the Labour Party en electoral advantage they should seize and not let go. Labour, the Lib Dems and Greens want someone else to pay. The Tories don’t.

The New Conservatism was good at campaigning. It’s rubbish at governing.

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